[msb-alumni] Co-host of NPR's beloved 'Car Talk' Tom Magliozzi Dies at 77
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2014 14:27:07 -0500
BlankCo-host of NPR's beloved 'Car Talk' left us laughing
By Ann Oldenburg, and Maria Puente, USA TODAY
St. Peter must be wondering what's all that racket at the Pearly Gates now
that Tom Magliozzi has pulled up in a ramshackle old Chevy, laughing
uproariously and shouting, "Don't drive like my brother!
The older half of the beloved National Public Radio show Car Talk's "Click
and Clack the Tappet Brothers," is gone, meaning no one else is likely to
make yakking and yucking it up about cars a laugh-a-minute riot ever again,
even to people who couldn't care less about cars. "Click has lost his
Clack," tweet-mourned Arnie Siepel of NPR. "Who knew carburetors could be so
funny? tweeted David Corn, Washington editor of Mother Jones.
So it went all afternoon Monday as the worlds of cars, comics and radio
reacted to the passing of Magliozzi, who died of complications from
Alzheimer's disease. He was 77. In a statement announcing his brother's
death, brother Ray alluded to a familiar joke about the weekly puzzlers they
always featured in the show. "Turns out he wasn't kidding. He really
couldn't remember last week's puzzler," Ray said.
"We can be happy that he lived the life he wanted to live: goofing off a
lot, talking to you guys every week and primarily laughing his ass off.
That could be his brother's epitaph: The one thing fans know most defined
Tom was his infectious laugh. Tom and Ray made Car Talk a weekly must-hear
show, turning advice about car troubles into entertaining radio with their
jokes and brotherly bantering, with each other and call-in guests. Many
people called as much to talk to them as to find out what was wrong with
their cars.
The show, one of NPR's most popular, began as a radio show on WBUR in Boston
decades ago, back when more people actually fixed their own cars. The
brothers took calls, answered questions, offered their brain-teasing math
"puzzlers" and generally goofed off. "
When we first started doing the show, it was mainly to attract customers to
(our) garage," Ray told USA TODAY in an interview in 2008. "We saw that as a
vehicle, no pun intended, to get people to know who we were. Tom said they
couldn't mention the name of the garage or where it was. "So we came up with
the idea of the puzzler, and we told people to send their answers to the
garage, at this address, and repeated it several times.
Cue the loud laugh. And a booming business: The show went national in 1987,
and the brothers ended up with something of a media empire that included
books, a syndicated newspaper column, a website and TV stints.
Tom was 12 years older than Ray. They grew up in a tough neighborhood of
East Cambridge, Mass., in a close-knit Italian family.
On the show, they came off as funny, regular-guy mechanics, but both
graduated from MIT. In addition to the radio show, the brothers appeared in
the 2006 Pixar film, Cars. In 2008, the brothers starred in their own PBS
animated series, Click and Clack's As the Wrench Turns, playing
fictionalized versions of themselves.
Tom was the first in his family to attend college. He got a degree in
chemical engineering, but he was never that enthralled by work, particularly
the 9-to-5 world. "He actually hated working in any world," Ray said in an
NPR blog post.
"Later on, when we were doing Car Talk, he would come in late and leave
early. We used to warn him that if he left work any earlier, he'd pass
himself coming in.
Tom once described his own attitude to his listeners: "Don't be afraid of
work. Make work afraid of you. I did such a fabulous job of making work
afraid of me that it has avoided me my whole life so far.
Before Car Talk, he "worked" as a Harvard Square bum, a house painter, an
inventor and an auto mechanic. Car Talk allowed him to do what he loved
most, Ray said: "Making friends, philosophizing, thinking out loud, solving
people's problems and laughing his butt off.
NPR's Susan Stamberg paid tribute in a blog post, saying, "Funny and smart
and big-hearted, Tom was as warm in real life as he was on the radio. Car
Talk ran from 1987 to 2012. It remains a top-rated show on NPR stations
where it plays in syndication. Tom is survived by his first wife, Julia;
second wife, Joanne; his children, Lydia Icke, Alex and Anna Magliozzi; five
grandchildren; and his close companion of recent years, Sylvia Soderberg.
In a note on the NPR site, Ray asked, "In lieu of flowers or rotten fish, I
know my brother would prefer folks made a donation to their favorite public
radio station in his memory. Contributing: Gary Levin
****
i i
Ray and Tom (right) Magliozzi, co-hosts of NPR's Car Talk show, pose for a
photo in Cambridge, Mass., in 2008. Tom died Monday of complications from
Alzheimer's disease. He was 77. Charles Krupa/AP hide caption
itoggle caption Charles Krupa/AP
Ray and Tom (right) Magliozzi, co-hosts of NPR's Car Talk show, pose for a
photo in Cambridge, Mass., in 2008. Tom died Monday of complications from
Alzheimer's disease. He was 77.
Charles Krupa/AP
When NPR Car Talk hosts Tom and Ray Magliozzi opened a do-it-yourself car
repair shop in Cambridge, Mass., in the early 1970s, Tom had never had so
many laughs. The people who came into the shop were complete "wackos," he
told Fresh Air's Terry Gross in 2001. "But man were they fun. And they
weren't worried! When the guy jacked up his Lincoln Town Car and drove the
floor jack through his oil pan, did he cry? He said, 'Uh oh.' I mean people
could take a joke!"
Tom died Monday of complications related to Alzheimer's disease. He was 77.
Car Talk is known for the car repair advice Tom and his brother, Ray,
dispensed, but it's perhaps even more popular for the brothers' comedic
banter. In fact, many people tune in who don't even own a car but just love
listening to the brothers.
The show's executive producer, Doug Berman, says Tom's laugh was incredibly
infectious.
"It was almost a force, almost separate from him," Berman says. "It was
always lurking, trying to come out. And he would see something funny coming
a few sentences away, and he would start to laugh while he was talking, and
he'd kind of be laughing and it would almost overtake him like a wave."
“I am proud to say that after 23 or [24] years on the radio we have learned
absolutely nothing. It's absolutely the truth. People say, 'Tell us about
radio!' We have no idea. We sit in front of the microphones and we know
nothing about radio. Nothing!
- Tom Magliozzi, co-host of Car Talk
Two years ago, the brothers stopped taping new episodes of Car Talk because
of Tom's Alzheimer's.
"He felt that he just wasn't what he used to be," Berman says. "And he had
such an incredible mind that it was really difficult for him."
Both Tom and Ray graduated from MIT, Tom with a degree in chemical
engineering. He went on to work in the marketing department of a
corporation, speculating about future trends. Then, after narrowly escaping
a crash with a tractor-trailer, Tom abandoned the corporate life and started
collecting unemployment insurance.
Ray, 12 years Tom's junior, told Gross in 2001 that his mother urged him to
try to rescue Tom from his layabout life. So Ray, who had been teaching
middle school in Vermont, returned to Boston, and Tom came up with the idea
of starting a garage.
Car Talk is still broadcast in an archival version. Fresh Air listens back
to Tom's and Ray's 2001 interview with Gross.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Interview Highlights
On their DIY repair shop in Cambridge
Tom: You couldn't make any money at it. It was a great concept and we have
never had as many laughs as we had the year that we opened that garage.
Ray: No, we had a rollicking good time. ... Belly laughs, because we
attracted every kind of inept weirdo that the city of Cambridge and the
surrounding towns had to offer.
Tom: There was no shortage.
Ray: There was no shortage and I was amazed to find out how many wackos
inhabited our fair city, and those who came in who thought they knew what
they were doing and didn't really expect us to do the work for them for
$2.50 an hour, or whatever we were charging them. We soon realized we were
doing all the work for everybody, running around like nuts. ... It was
pretty much a bust. ... What really drove us out of business was the fact
that in 1973, fixing one's own car was within the grasp of the average
person. But as emission controls came into being and cars got more
complicated, it soon disappeared — that ability soon disappeared — and we
found the business diminished considerably. People in Cambridge who had had
the time because they were unemployed bums, like my brother, to work on
their own cars went out and got jobs and bought newer cars. ...
Tom: But it's interesting how much fun the bums could be. I mean, these were
complete wackos, weirdos, as my brother said, he's absolutely right, but man
were they fun. ... I mean people could take a joke! People weren't as
uptight as they are now. It was only a car. ... What was really sort of
spiritual about it was that nobody ever got hurt. I mean, in all the years
that we did that, [with] complete rank amateurs using very dangerous
equipment ...
Ray: We didn't know any better either! You wanna use the torch, yeah? Go
ahead! We'll be standing on the other side of the brick wall.
Tom: Here, wear this football helmet. Call us if anything happens — we're
going out for coffee!
On their first radio appearances as part of a WBUR car mechanics panel in
1977:
Tom: We didn't know that it was a real radio station. It's part of Boston
University and, at the time, the studios, I mean, you'd think it was like
1920.
Ray: The equipment resembled the tin cans and the string.
Tom: You'd expect [Italian inventor Guglielmo] Marconi to walk by any
minute. And so, our assumption was, you know, first of all, who is listening
to this station? And we thought it was a station that only broadcast on like
wires within the school, within BU.
Ray: We thought it had, you know, 50-watt capacity and then we found out it
had 50,000 watts.
Tom: Well, when they turned on the microphones, the lights dimmed. So yeah,
I think we were pretty relaxed.
On how much Car Talk changed over the years
Ray: It sounded surprisingly like the new shows do.
Tom: It did?
Ray: I mean, we tended to, if we got someone on the line who we thought was
interesting, we tended to talk to that person for whatever a period of time
we thought was appropriate, sometimes 25 minutes. And our producer Doug
Berman [who joined the show when it went national in 1987] would never allow
that. Now he's giving us the cut sign and waving his hands and jumping up
and down if we go more than five or six minutes — he gets nervous. But other
than that, I would say the show is pretty much the same.
Tom: Really?
Ray: Which begs the question, why do we need Berman? ...
Tom: I've been asking that question since Day 1.
On learning how to do radio and constantly laughing on the air
Tom: No one ever told us anything. Until maybe a week ago, we would walk
into the studio and say, "Are we on?" I mean, we had absolutely no
information. We knew the room we would go to, we knew where to sit and that
was it.
Ray: The only reason we knew that is there was a show on the hour before us
called Shop Talk, which was two or three guys talking about stereo equipment
and recording and the like. And we would watch them through the glass and we
would see how far away from the microphone they sat. And we noticed they
wore headphones and we noticed they pressed the lighted buttons on the phone
to talk to callers, and so we patterned ourselves after what they did.
Tom: I am proud to say that after 23 or [24] years on the radio we have
learned absolutely nothing. It's absolutely the truth. People say, "Tell us
about radio!" We have no idea. We sit in front of the microphones and we
know nothing about radio. Nothing!
Ray: We've never made an attempt to learn anything, either. And we do laugh
a lot, too much sometimes, and I'm sure people complain. And there are many
people who can't stand us.
Tom: My wife is one of them!
Ray: Well, that goes without saying. Which wife?
Tom: All of them
FreshAir has an interview with them from a dozen years ago, but I couldn't
get it to play in IE yet. I think I got it downloaded with Firefox though.
http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/
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